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Roma

(2018)

Semi-autobiographical drama from Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón chronicling a year in the life of a middle-class family in '70s Roma, Mexico City. Best Film winner at Venice Film Festival 2018 and holds Golden Globes for Best Director and Best Foreign-Language Film.... More

Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) works for Sofia (Marina de Tavira), a mother of four coping with the absence of her husband. Cleo loves Sofia’s children as her own, but troubling news threatens to relinquish her employment. While the country faces political upheaval, Cleo and Sofia quietly wrestle with changes infiltrating the family home.Hide

Roma

If you're only gonna go see one black-and-white foreign film at the movies this Summer, Roma is the one to see (sorry, Cold War), 'cause I predict it's that miraculous rarity: an art-house film, beloved by critics, which the multiplex should also find accessible, moving, and resonant. Don't @me. It's just a guess. Hear me out.

There's little propulsive plot but, rather, Roma accumulates vividly rendered moments, second-hand memories, which add up to a touching snapshot of a life (Cleo, live-in... More housekeeper of Indian descent), a family (her middle-class Mexican employers and their children), and social upheaval (Mexico City, circa 1970). It is an intimate epic where little really happens, but what does happen - and the way Alfonso Cuaron renders it in those prime cinematic terms of image, sound, and time - is quietly mesmerising. It's cumulative power is real.

It's something intensely personal made universal, that finds beauty in the banal, and wonder in the prosaic. It's made with love but resists easy sentiment or romanticism. It's serious but not humourless, slow but never dull, and it's realised with such assured cinematic confidence, such unpretentious humanity, it feels like a lost masterpiece "unveiled", not brand-new but rescued from decades of unjust obscurity.

I left the theatre elated, feeling privileged to have had the opportunity to experience it that way. The fact it was financed by Netflix notwithstanding, Roma bears out hope that even in our brave new world of digital entertainment, the classic cinematic form is still a vital, magical medium of modern human expression.Hide

So full of dazzlingly intricate visual poetry, so teeming with sensory spirit, that trying to review it is a bit like trying to review all of life. Which may sound a bit grandiose, but Cuarón's magnum opus provokes such turgid sentiment.Full Review